Methods for creating Kosovo demographic data
Wes Hinsley
07 November 2017
Introduction
The Republic of Kosovo is a partly-recognised state, and a disputed territory, that declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. Its population is entirely within what was known as Serbia prior to 2008, and because of its status, it is often assumed to still be part of Serbia. At the time of writing, this is the case for the UNWPP data, and the Child Mortality (IGME) data, where Serbia is described, but not Kosovo.
However, it is a country the VIMC groups must produce burden estimates for, and therefore we need to provide demographic data, which we will refer to by country code “XK”. This demographic data should cover the 1950-2100 range that UNWPP provide for other countries, even though Kosovo did not exist for the first 58 years of that period.
This is consistent with UNWPP’s own approach for South Sudan, which gained independence from Sudan in 2011; UNWPP back-dated the change to 1950, and recalculated populations of both the countries. A simplifying factor for us though, is that Gavi do not require burden estimates for Serbia, so we do not need to be concerned about any implications on Serbia’s demographic data, that our treatment of Kosovo may create.
This report describes the construction of the demographic data using Serbia data to guide the process, and comparing to external data sources where we’ve been able to find them.
The methods below are carried out after the population estimation for over-80 age groups before 1990, which is documented separately. That process creates over-80 age-group for Serbia, the results of which we will scale to create Kosovo data. Also, see the documentation on child mortality, for the method used to create neonatal mortality, where we use the data calculated for Serbia.
Method
For all of the data fields in UNWPP that are expressed as rates or proportions, we assume we can use UNWPP’s data for Serbia as applying to Kosovo equivalently. This also applies for the neonatal mortality rate, and the “number of survivors from a theoretical cohort”, since the starting cohort size is constant 100,000.
Where the data fields are absolute numbers of people though; (number of deaths, number of people of certain age, etc), we use simple scaling, where the scaling factor is the population of Kosovo in 2015, divded by the population of Serbia 2015, where we used http://geoba.se for the Kosovo population data.
While using a single scaling factor across the time series seems crude, it is necessary to provide internal consistency with the other UNWPP data for Serbia; the total population (and total births, deaths, etc), for Kosovo will have to be a simple scaling of those figures for Serbia, to be consistent with the rates of change we are adopting.
Scaling
Comparisons for scaled absolute numbers
The following graphs show for each statistic type represented by absolute numbers, (as opposed to rates or proportions), where we have scaled from Serbia’s data to approximate Kosovo’s. We also show external data to compare to - which for Kosovo amounts to just the total population data.
Fertility
Population by age
UNWPP provide population data in two forms. The first, form is “quinquennial” (QQ), meaning the number of people in a 5-year age-band, reported at 5-year intervals. This is the resolution at which UNWPP’s source data is represented. The second form is “interpolated”, where UNWPP provide population data in 1-year age-bands, at single yearly intervals.
